A Feast Unknown by Philip José Farmer Read Free Book Online Page A

under a blanket woven of bronze wires. I know that that is a rather fanciful description, but that is what occurred to me.
    The other two whites, old men, sat on folding chairs with their backs to me. The smaller was thin, quick-moving, wary as a bird, and had a face sharp as the neck of a broken-off bottle. He was dressed as if he had just stepped out of the most expensive safari outfitter’s store in Nairobi. As he talked, he gestured frequently with a silver-headed black cane.
    The other old man was so wide and had such abnormally long arms, thick neck, simian features, and low forehead, and his arms were so hairy, he could almost have passed for one of The Folk.
    The blacks had talked among themselves in Swahili, so I knew the names of all three whites. The man in the tent was a Doctor Caliban. The dapper old man was a Mr. Rivers. The apish old man was a Mr. Simmons. All three were from Manhattan Island.
    I suspected that the old men were talking so loudly because they hoped to entice an eavesdropper—me, of course—to come closer. I found the trip wire which would have set off some kind of alarm and got over that without disturbing it. I also detected the two rocks, made of papier-mâché, which held electronic eye devices inside them. I had come close to wriggling between them, because that was the natural route to a depression in the ground behind a bush, an excellent place to hide while listening. Only because I happened to rub up against the false stone did I discover what it was.
    I became even more cautious then. And I noticed that the flap of the tent in which Doctor Caliban had been exercising was now closed. For all I knew, he might be slipping out the rear of the tent to catch a spy.
    If the two old men were part of a trap, they certainly took no care to keep silent on matters that an enemy should not know. And they talked about Caliban as if he were deaf.
    I crawled around to one side where I could see their lips. This was not as informative as listening, because I missed words now and then, but it was safer.
    “...really know what’s got into Doc?” the dapper Rivers said. “Something sure as shit is wrong.”
    “Looks as if he’s gone ape,” Simmons said.
    Rivers laughed and spoke so loudly I could hear him. “Ape! Ape? You old Neanderthal, you’re throwing stones at a glass house!”
    “Listen, you sick legal eagle, you,” Simmons said, “this is no time or place for your tired old bullshit. This is serious, I’m telling you. Doc has a screw loose somewhere. I think it’s theelixir; it has to be. The side effects are finally coming through. I warned him years ago, when he offered it to us. I ain’t one of the world’s greatest chemists for nothing.”
    I had been intrigued before. Now I was caught, a crocodile on a hook. Elixir!
    “You really think he’s crazy? After all these years of doing good, combating evil, fixing up all those criminals we caught, and reforming them?” Rivers said.
    The apish old man said, “That’s another thing …”
    I missed what he said next, then his cigar left his lips. “… operated on them, he said. Cut out the gland that made them evil, he said at first. Then later on he quit talking about that gland, because there ain’t no such thing, and he started to talk about re-routing and short-circuiting neural circuits. Now, I ask you, do you really believe that shit? It was all right in the old days, because we didn’t know much about the causes of crime then. But it’s different now. We know it’s caused mainly by psychosocioeconomic environments.”
    “Do we?” Rivers said. “What really do we know now more than we knew then, besides some things in the physical sciences and a little progress in the biological?”
    “O.K., so they ain’t as smart nowadays as they like to think they are,” Simmons said. “But in the ’30s, we could believe anything Doc told us because he told us it was so. But did you ever see him operate on a criminal? Not